Field Trip: Tröegs Brewery / Newport Folk Fest

It’s been a long and busy couple of months since we’ve graduated and been able to focus on the company full-time. And if you’ve been following some of our recent updates, you already know that we have a lot of awesome stuff planned for the next few months as well. A quick vacation is the perfect intermission to our hectic summer.

Our annual pilgrimage to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island has once again arrived, and this year we decided to take a bit of a field trip on the way: the Tröegs Brewery in Hershey, PA. Roughly four hours outside of Pittsburgh, the brand new 100-barrel Tröegs facility is absolutely stunning… massive, shiny, surgically clean, well-designed, and well-laid-out. It has an expansive taproom and café area, serving small plates of excellent food to pair with their selection of flagships and experimental Scratch beers. The brewery/tasting tour (led by tour coordinator Andrea Lewis) was one of the best brewery tours we’ve ever been on, focusing mainly on the brewing process itself and on all the bells and whistles of the new facility.

It’s way too early for us to be setting such lofty goals, but Tröegs is the perfect example of where we want to see ourselves as a company someday.

 

August/September

We’ve got a lot planned for the coming months. I think it would be best for all parties involved if I just bulletpoint this sucker rather than trying to brute-force it into prose.

• We’ve got two tentative tasting events planned: the first in late August at Bocktown in Robinson, and the second in early September at The Hartwood Restaurant in Glenshaw (where we held our first beer dinner). We’re serving both our White Sky chai white ale and General Braddock IPA at both, so if you’re itching to try our beer, these look like an excellent bet. More info coming soon.
• We’re in the process of working with the folks that are doing the Tapped popup beer garden events around Pittsburgh to host another in Braddock sometime in mid-September. This will be an excellent opportunity for people to have a few beers, relax, and see some of the awesome stuff going on in Braddock these days.
• Keep an eye out for articles about the brewery in both the Post-Gazette and the Tribune-Review. We will obviously post them to the blog when they’re published, but if you still consume your news in physical form, consider yourself forewarned.
• The sixth annual Steel City Big Pour is coming up on September 8th at Construction Junction. This is one of the best beer events this city has to offer, so make plans early!
• Our Kickstarter campaign is planned to start in September. Before we launch, I’ll write an exhaustive explanation of the benefits and weaknesses of the Kickstarter platform and why we’ve chosen to use it. But for now we just wanted to put it on the radar.
• We’ll be back to doing construction work on the brewery shortly.
• A new website is on the way, because a perpetual “under construction” page is total bush-league.

And if you haven’t signed up for our newsletter yet, you can do so here. Cheers.

Raining Sideways

Getting into a good routine of writing blog posts is pretty difficult, especially when you don’t have some sort of important event or momentous breakthrough to specifically update folks about. But what it does help us do is focus on the small things: the tiny victories, the amusing mishaps, and all of the bizarro-world situations we keep finding ourselves in along the way.

Last Wednesday’s brief but apocalyptically intense thunderstorm rolled through Braddock at around 2:30, raining near-horizontally and knocking out our power mid-brew. Given that a.) our windows are in the process of being fixed and are thus boarded up, and b.) we have been incredibly remiss in purchasing a flashlight for the brewery, we were stuck in the pitch black. We ended up using our cell phones as a light source for a solid chunk of the brewing process, extremely determined not to let the lack of lighting (or the water gushing through the floor drains) get in the way of finishing the batch. Thankfully, nothing went horribly wrong, and we were able to snag some cool during-and-after shots of the storm from our doorway.

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